What the current scores mean
Scores are not a lab-speed leaderboard yet. They are research-backed editorial ratings based on privacy policy evidence, ownership, jurisdiction, audit history, public performance patterns, app features, pricing, renewal risk, refund terms, and the provider's usefulness for real scenarios such as public Wi-Fi, travel, streaming, torrenting, and home lab remote access.
We do not label a result as first-party tested unless we ran that test ourselves. When a claim comes from provider material, public documentation, third-party testing, or community sentiment, the surrounding copy should make that clear.
Scoring weights
The weighting favors trust and practical reliability over coupon size. A cheap VPN can still rank poorly if the ownership story, logging policy, renewal terms, or app behavior is weak.
Evidence we review
- Privacy policies, logging language, warrant canaries, transparency reports, and provider support documents.
- Independent audit claims, audit scope, audit recency, and whether summaries are publicly available.
- Ownership, parent company structure, jurisdiction, merger history, and trust concerns raised by privacy communities.
- Advertised pricing, renewal pricing, refund windows, plan length, device limits, and bundle upsells.
- Protocol support, kill switch behavior claims, DNS leak protection claims, split tunneling, obfuscation, and platform support.
- Public speed, streaming, torrenting, travel, and support patterns from reputable reviews and community feedback.
Hands-on and lab test status
Some reviews now include paid-account hands-on use. We label those pages directly. Hands-on use can support app usability, account setup, support, travel friction, and everyday reliability notes, but it is not the same as a repeatable benchmark unless the page includes the test date, device, operating system, ISP baseline, selected server regions, protocol, app version, and measured results.
The repeatable test bench covers baseline ISP speed, repeated WireGuard and OpenVPN tests across nearby and long-distance regions, DNS leak checks, WebRTC leak checks, IPv6 checks, kill-switch failure checks, app install checks, captive portal behavior, support response checks, and refund-process checks. If a result cannot be repeated, it should not become a headline claim.
Editorial independence
Provider links are currently plain outbound links, and the site earns no commissions at launch. If affiliate links are introduced later, they will not buy placement. Reviews keep pricing caveats, ownership concerns, missing evidence, and limitations visible near recommendation copy. Providers may ask for corrections, but they do not get to rewrite verdicts or remove caveats because a link converts well.
When a provider is a strong commercial pick but a weaker privacy-purist pick, the review should say that plainly. The goal is to help readers choose the right VPN for their threat model, not to flatten every page into the same discount button.